Over at the Cato Institute’s Cato@Liberty blog, Julian Sanchez responds to the recent guest post by former Justice Department official Carrie Cordero on FISA Amendments Act reauthorization. Writes Sanchez:
we seem to have at least 13 senators who don’t believe
No, not Latif the Guantanamo habeas case. This Latif is a recent 9th Circuit decision which I had missed until Shirin Sinnar of Stanford Law School sent me the following the other day:
In a little noticed decision, the
That’s the word from the Senate — Majority Leader Harry Reid has filed for cloture to conclude the debate on the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 — debate that began in earnest earlier today. In addition, he s invoked a procedural … Read more »
The plaintiffs have filed their reply in support of their request for a permanent injunction in the case of Hedges v. Obama. (Recall that plaintiffs prevailed on their motion for a preliminary injunction with respect to Section 1021 of … Read more »
Dan Byman, Director of Research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings, has a new paper out entitled “Breaking the Bonds between Al Qaeda and its Affiliate Organizations.” The paper, according to the Brookings … Read more »
As a fellow Arlingtonian and a reasonably tech-savvy person, I join Air Force General Counsel Charles Blanchard in taking issue with the categorization of Arlingtonians by our friends in the Bay Area as too technologically backwards to use an RSS … Read more »
Senator Leahy has an proposed Cybercrime Amendment to S3414 that would, effectively, substantially enhance penalties for cyber crime and impose mandatory minimum sentences. There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of this — but the main one offered by … Read more »
I just received the following email from Air Force General Counsel Charles A. Blanchard in response to my correspondent from San Francisco, who had hypothesized that West Coast Lawfare readers might be too technologically sophisticated to show up in … Read more »
I just received the following email from a loyal reader in the Bay Area complaining about the manner in which Google Analytics counts readers:
I write in the spirit of the age-old outraged reader–though my particular complaint concerns a
Here’s a fun—and strangely evocative—factoid about Lawfare’s readership.
Over this site’s nearly two years of existence, our readership has been heavily concentrated in Washington DC. Seventeen percent of our visits, according to Google Analytics, have come from Washington—more than … Read more »
Rajiv Chandrasekaran over at the Washington Post has this breaking news on the just-released report by the inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction. Read the full report here, previous reports to Congress here, the Post story here, a … Read more »
This weekend, I both posted an excellent guest post from Geoffrey Corn on civilian harm mitigation and wrote a musing post myself about martial arts and LOAC—which offered an excellent excuse to publish my badass taekwondo sparring video. While … Read more »
Ah … the life of a “journalist.” I don’t think of myself that way, but now I have a couple of confidential sources (or so it seems). Attached here is the Whitehouse-Kyl compromise language for replacing Title I of the … Read more »
Geoffrey S. Corn of the South Texas College of Law writes in with the following comments on our recent exchange concerning the Army’s new manual on minimizing civilian casualties.
I feel compelled to offer my thoughts on the exchange
My correspondent (and friend) Gus Coldebella, wrote in the other day with a response to an earlier post of mine, in which he wondered what the meaning of section 706(d) of the Lieberman-Collins bill is. I hadn’t noticed … Read more »
The other day, I posted an email from Major John Harwood of the U.S. Air Force in connection with the coming Lawfare Drone Smackdown. It reads in relevant part:
. . . you’ve established your own LOAC.
“No drone
Over at Forbes.com, Pepperdine law professor Gregory McNeal has this response to the critique I linked to the other day by Jonathan Horowitz of the Army’s new manual on preventing harm to civilians. It opens:
Last week I wrote
I’ll continue in the same vein as Raffaela’s focus yesterday on everything cyber. The New York Times reports that Gen. Keith B. Alexander, head of the NSA and the U.S. Cyber Command said that “there had been a 17-fold increase … Read more »
We have two new entrants in the Smackdown—and we have a judge.
Shane Harris—senior editor of Washingtonian magazine and author of this book about surveillance and this paper on the “Human-Free Future of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles”—will officiate.… Read more »
Wells posted yesterday the government’s filing on the question of continued access to counsel for Guantanamo detainees who have lost their habeas cases. I have now read through the motion, and I have to say, I’m a little perplexed.
To … Read more »
Over at the Emptywheel blog, Ms. Wheel (aka Marcy Wheeler) has this response to former Justice Department official Carrie Cordero’s guest post of this morning. She notes that Senator Wyden responded at yesterday’s CATO event to one of the … Read more »
Gus Coldebella, former Deputy General Counsel (and Acting General Counsel) for DHS and now a partner at Goodwin Proctor write in with this addition comment on the liability provisions of the Lieberman-Collins bill [I added the hyperlink to my prior … Read more »
Today, in preparation for the Lawfare Drone Smackdown, and to kill some time I might have spent productively, I decided to fly my drone around the Governance Studies offices at Brookings.
The Mission? To deliver a note to Brookings … Read more »
Here is the Administration’s Statement of Administration Policy on the Lieberman-Collins bill. On the regulatory provisions and the information-sharing liability provisions they are drawing a line in the sand:
The revised bill contains critical-infrastructure protection measures that are less robust
Apparently prompted by David Remes’ motion regarding GTMO counsel access issues in Esmail [h/t Josh Gerstein at Politico], the government now has filed its own motion.
I’ve only glanced at the new filing, but it seems the government … Read more »
Ryan Radia, who works for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, writes in with a few a couple of addition points about the liability exemption provisions of the Lieberman-Collins bill in Section 706. He notes:
- It isn’t clear to me
I am officially declaring cybersecurity legislation to be today’s big story of the day. The Hill has a slew of stories on the politics of getting a compromise bill passed, including this piece detailing Senator Harry Reid’s reaction to the … Read more »
Carrie Cordero, Georgetown’s Director of National Security Studies and a former Justice Department official, writes in with the following account of a recent Cato Institute event (which, ahem, would have been on the Lawfare calendar and the good folks … Read more »
Jonathan Horowitz of the Open Society Justice Initiative has largely positive comments on the new Army manual on avoiding civilian harm. It opens:
This month, Lawfareblog.com posted the U.S. Army’s new manual on Civilian Casualty Mitigation (ATTP 3-37.31), which
In March, Congress passed the Stop Insider Trading in Congressional Knowledge Act (the STOCK Act), which was intended to prevent members of Congress from trading in securities based on non-public information gained in their official positions. Unfortunately, an amendment added … Read more »
I received the following response from Richard Klingler to my ACSblog post on Monday re: the Al-Aulaqi suit and Bivens, and thought I’d post it in its entirety (below the fold) before replying (also below the fold):
I just received a very interesting email from Major John Harwood, USAF, whom I met recently at the MILOPS Conference in Singapore, in response to my post this morning about the coming Drone Smackdown:
I love the Drone Smackdown,
Word is that Senator Reid has filed cloture on the motion to proceed to consideration of the Lieberman-Collins bill. [UPDATE: At the request of two readers I’ve uploaded the latest version of the text of the bill. As with … Read more »
Several stories have emerged about U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling that the State Department doesn’t have to make classified cables public irrespective of what WikiLeaks does with them. Here are the New York Times and the Associated Press.… Read more »
The other day, I was out flying my new drone, practicing for the Lawfare Drone Smackdown. Standing on my front porch, I flew it across the street and hovered over a couple of kids and their father, who were … Read more »
Judge Pohl’s docketing order, in which he adjusts the calendar in United States v. Mohammed et al. and announces the agenda for August’s motions hearing, is now available.
Following last week’s motions hearing in Maqaleh and Hamidullah, the cases seeking habeas jurisdiction over the detention facility at Bagram, the petitioners in Maqaleh have filed a supplemental brief arguing against the government’s motion to dismiss. Here are some … Read more »
The government has filed its brief in opposition to the plantiffs’ motion for a permanent injunction–and seeking dismissal of the case. The brief opens as follows:
Defendants Barack Obama,Leon Panetta, and the Department of Defense (collectively, the “government”) respectfully
This Friday, I’ll be joining Benjamin Powell from WilmerHale (and formerly, inter alia, the General Counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence) for a Federalist Society teleforum on Clapper v. Amnesty International–the lawsuit challenging the constitutionality … Read more »
The Washington Post has more on who was behind the deadly attacks in Iraq and what they mean for country’s stability.
Reuters reports that five female detainees linked to Al Qaeda have been released by Saudi officials.
It’s not just … Read more »
Senate Majority Leader Reid spoke on the Senate floor earlier today explaining why the Senate needed to consider cybersecurity legislation as an urgent matter and, in particular, why he would prioritize the cyber bill over the Defense Authorization bill. You … Read more »
I will soon be posting on SSRN, with my co-author Sam Issacharoff, a draft academic article that offers a broad, integrated conceptual and legal framework for understanding specific counterterrorism legal and policy issues, such as detention and targeted killings. Given … Read more »
Judge James Pohl has tweaked the calendar in United States v. Mohammed a bit.
Earlier, the court had pushed back an upcoming August session, in light of Ramadan; that postponement left in place a separate hearing, which had been set … Read more »
Today, Australia’s government formally abandoned its lawsuit to prevent David Hicks—the first defendant ever to plead guilty to military commission charges—from profiting from the sale of his book, Guantanamo: My Journey.
In a statement, the Commonwealth Director of … Read more »
The other day, Wells drew my attention to what could be the single most excellently eccentric national security-oriented project currently ongoing on the web: It is called Clausewitz for Kids. I am apparently not the first to discover it. … Read more »
By now you’ve pored over last week’s complaint in Al-Aulaqi et al v. Panetta et al. I’ve only got one cent to add to the already quite robust discussion of the lawsuit, and it has to do with the last … Read more »
As we have all noted, Senators Lieberman and Collins have proposed a revised version of their cybersecurity legislation. They’ve touted it as a compromise bill that moves closer to the middle and addresses industry concerns. If this Myth v Fact … Read more »
Over at the ACSblog, I have a guest post up on Al-Aulaqi v. Panetta and Ben’s suspicion that the lawsuit will go the way of Arar, Lebron, Doe, and Rasul–with courts holding that there should be … Read more »
Yasir Ghazi and Rob Nordland of the New York Times tell us that today was the bloodiest day all year in Iraq, with 37 coordinated attacks killing at least 97 people and injuring more than 300.
For all those concerned … Read more »
Friday, May 17, 2013
The Department of Justice’s Inspector General released an interim report on the Department’s handling of “known or suspected” terrorists who have entered the government’s witness protection program. The report found, among other things, that information on some program participants had not been turned over to no-fly list authorities; and, that two such people could not be located—though one… Read more »
